Old-time music performer Alexia Smith is the widow of Mike Seeger

Traditional clawhammer-style banjo picking ain't no technique-it's a link to a culture, an old-timey culture, but also a regional one, populated by people steeped in more rustic ways. Yasha Aginsky's brand-spanking-new Banjo Tales follows the legendary folklorist and string-band performer Mike Seeger (New Lost City Ramblers) as he travels through Appalachia in search of traditional banjo players. Like a present-day Alan Lomax, or even our own Chris Strachwitz, Seeger (1933–2009) sets down on a porch, in a log cabin living room, or out in a meadow, digital recorder nearby, to listen to banjo players whose styles sustain a direct link to the locale. These bucolic musicians from several generations are not intent on recapturing the culture, so much as nurturing its continuity. Among them are Tina Steffey, a teen plucker who continues despite her drop in popularity after she adopts that totally uncool instrument; the sage George Gibson, impromptu historian, who sees clawhammer surviving the changing times; Peter Gott, a Northern transplant who withdrew to the hills of Madison County to build banjos; and Rhiannon Giddens, of Carolina Chocolate Drops fame, who muses that “if we're living in it, then we're changing it.” Clawhammer, with its relentless rhythm sitting atop innumerable mercurial melodies, is the steady strum beneath Banjo Tales. But its mix of casually eloquent pickers sounds everything from the holler to the scholar.